52 pages • 1 hour read
Gabor Maté, Daniel MatéThe Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a Toxic Culture
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2022A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
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Personal Narrative and New Ways of Healing
The Myth of Normal is bookended by Maté’s own personal narrative of healing and redemption. The book begins with Maté retelling an episode of irrational resentment against his wife that he claims was rooted in his abandonment by his mother when he was a child in Hungary. It ends with Maté describing his transformative experience of taking the psychedelic ayahuasca in the Amazon. As Maté says, this allowed him to temporarily “divest from the trauma-confined personality” (459) and to some extent deal with his childhood abandonment issues.
This is just one of the stories of illness and healing that run throughout the text. For example, there is the case of a woman, Mee Ok, who suffered from the debilitating illness of scleroderma, which both confined her to a wheelchair and left her in continual pain. Despite being given no hope by doctors, she was able, by confronting her “hidden inner distress” (75) and the abuse she suffered as a child, to achieve a full recovery. Other stories include those of writer Anita Moorjani, playwright and activist Eve Ensler, and many others, including a woman, Julia, suffering from rheumatoid arthritis, and a man, Will, coming to terms with a brain tumor. In both the latter cases, their redemption lay not so much in medical recovery but in an ability to find meaning and authenticity through their illnesses.
Though these inspirational stories illustrate Maté's point, it is not immediately obvious what purpose these narratives serve. As Maté says, “we doctors pride ourselves on what we call evidence based practice” (487). What this means is that when it comes to disease, medicine concerns itself with large scale empirical studies of causes and large bodies of evidence to back up its findings. Individual stories of illness cannot substitute for this. Thus, it is possible to view the narratives in The Myth of Normal as a stylistic device to keep the reader interested in Maté's argument in a way they would not be if he simply presented statistics and scientific theory.
However, Maté is making a deeper point with his use of personal narratives. As he says, often in Western medicine, patients' “essential questions about their lives go unasked” (75). By stressing individual experiences, Maté aims to show how important the details of someone’s life and past are in explaining the emergence of disease. Equally, he hopes to show how the experience and activity of the individual is crucial to the process of healing and recovery. As Maté says, these stories encourage us to “take our place as active participants in the process, rather than remain its victims, helpless but for our reliance on medical miracle workers” (90). Instead of passively ingesting pills or submitting to surgeries, we can also inquire into ourselves and the traumas and tensions that may be hurting us. Maté does stress that such self-discovery does not guarantee an end to illness: Each individual’s case is different, and many other factors, such as genetics and age, can affect chances of recovery. Still, with these stories, Maté does show how such healing through self-awareness is possible and important.
Indigenous Cultures as a Counterpoint to Modernity
Throughout The Myth of Normal, Maté evinces a respect for the Indigenous cultures and peoples of North and South America, including people he has interviewed in the US, the Shipibo shamans in Peru, and First Nations patients he has worked with in Canada. Maté's interest in Indigenous peoples does not stem from intellectual curiosity or sympathy for the suffering such people have endured at the hands of European colonialists. Rather, Maté’s respect for these cultures is based on a sense that much can be learned from them. Many problematic aspects of Western culture can be ameliorated, if not entirely resolved, by looking closely at and incorporating Indigenous practices.
The first example of this is given in relation to pregnancy. As Maté says, quoting a man from a First Nations group, “[I]n our clan the tradition was that if you were angry or upset, you weren’t even allowed to go near a pregnant woman” (144). This idea accords with recent research suggesting that negative emotions and stress in or in proximity to the pregnant mother can be highly damaging for the baby. As such, the Indigenous practice of keeping people with negative emotions away from a pregnant woman is beneficial and demonstrates a veneration for pregnancy that, Maté argues, is often lacking in Western culture. The same can be said for the process of childbirth. Maté describes how Indigenous cultures treat the process as “a sacred life passage” (159) to be pursued in harmony with nature, the community, and “innate body sense” (147). In contrast, Western medicine tends to pathologize pregnancy, focusing only on the bodily mechanics involved and ignoring the emotional and spiritual needs of the mother.
Finally, examining Indigenous cultures also highlights the problems of Western culture when it comes to childcare. Maté argues that Western culture and the childcare “experts” who are its spokespeople prioritize the needs of parents, or more specifically the need for parents to work, over those of the children. For example, one Indigenous woman told Maté that “in our clan, children weren’t even allowed to touch the ground until they were two years old. They were in our arms all the time” (163). Care and intimacy were prioritized both over economics and the demands for early socialization. Relatedly, Indigenous cultures that practice communal parenting expose the limitations of the modern two-parent nuclear family. However, it would be wrong to say that Maté’s interest in Indigenous cultures ends at forgotten lessons about pregnancy and child development. Instead, Maté views this wisdom as stemming from what he calls a broader “Native wisdom” (472) of Indigenous cultures that is more in touch with nature and the human body, and that focuses on the interconnectedness of life and health rather than the functioning of the body's isolated parts.
Maté’s purpose is not to replace Western culture or medicine with Indigenous culture but to address its blind spots. As Maté says of Indigenous wisdom, “[I]ts broad, unitary perspective could round out the dualistic, biological focus of the Western medical mentality” (472).
The Logic of Addiction in 21st-Century Capitalism
Much of Maté’s work as a physician is focused on treating addiction. He worked for 12 years as a doctor in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, “North America’s most concentrated area of drug use,” treating “people living lives of desperate dependence on substances of all kinds […], alcohol opiates, nicotine, cannabis, cocaine, crystal meth” (212). Such experience has given Maté an empathy for the plight of people who struggle with addiction. It has also given him an understanding of the nature and logic of addiction, which is demonstrated in connection with many cultural and market phenomena throughout The Myth of Normal. Maté defines addiction as “any behavior in which a person finds temporary relief or pleasure and therefore craves, but in the long term causes them or others negative consequences” (224-25). Addiction is also characterized as an inability to stop the behavior in question despite knowledge or experience of its harmful effects.
Maté’s innovation in analyzing addiction is not in seeing that addiction is rooted in an effort to escape the effects of trauma or to experience connection that is lacking elsewhere in one's life. Nor is his innovation to acknowledge that, viewed in this light, addiction can apply to many activities other than taking substances. Rather, the originality of Maté’s analysis of addiction is that addiction is a behavioral and psychosocial spectrum: “[I]t is yet another myth that in our world there is a category we can label ‘addicts’ […] and then, neatly segregated from ‘those people’, there are the rest of us ‘normal’ folks’” (223). In other words, addiction, like illness, is not something one either has or does not have. Instead, in this trauma-inflected and alienated society, addictive behavior is something that affects all of us to various degrees.
Contemporary Western society can be seen as powered by addiction as in capitalist consumerism, the primary relationship is between product and consumer. Driven by the profit motive, companies seek “to market happiness in a bottle” (298). They seek to create a need that did not previously exist and to sell their product to temporarily satisfy that need. For example, soda and cereal companies in the US created a need and a market for products that have little to no nutritional value and are actually harmful.
This process has become supercharged in the 21st century with companies' adoption of neuromarketing techniques, or techniques “consciously aimed at the hyperactivation and constant agitation of the dopamine/endorphin functions of the brain” (299). However, the socioeconomic mechanism of addiction goes even deeper. On a collective level, we are caught in a continual and unsustainable cycle of technological and economic expansion to feed consumerism. Like the individual addict, we are aware of the harmful effects of this process in terms of environmental destruction and social alienation, but we seemingly have no ability to stop. The logic of this expansionist consumer impulse is so rooted in Western economic and political systems that, like the addict and their drug, we cannot envisage a world without it.
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